TRANS> area is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the United States of work by Artur Barrio, one of the seminal, influential artists of the late sixties living in Rio de Janeiro. This exhibition will open with action (“situations”) in the streets of Chelsea on Saturday May 11 from 5-7 pm. Opening reception for the artist will be on Saturday, May 11 from 7- 8:30 pm.

In its radical singularity, the work of Artur Barrio constitutes a very particular example of the way in which art can renounce its objectuality. “I make use of precarious materials (including perishable situations), according to my awareness as an individual and at the same time as the result of a collective, socio-economic view of reality.” Responding to his ‘Third World' strata, materials comprise of the accessible and the affordable: toilet paper, meat, urine, cloth, bits of nails, fish, etc. Barrio's work becomes ephemeral and non-institutional and its documentation of the actions (performances) is through videos, slide projections, photography—its ‘phantom double'.

At TRANS>area Barrio will do a new installation as well as a selection of pieces from the seventies including “Situation……CITY…Y…..COUNTRY…….(1970).…..” in which he distributes bundles of baguettes, or as he calls them CONDENSED ENERGY, during a heated military regime in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. In the museum he piles them in a corner for people to take.

Barrio's work has appeared in group shows including Information, New York MoMA, 1970; Re-aligning Vision—Alternate Currents in South American Drawing, itinerant: Museo del Barrio, New York, 1996; Arches M. Huntington Art Gallery, Austin; XXIII São Paulo Bienal and Kwangju Bienal, South Korea, 2000. In 2000 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Serralves, Oporto, Portugal organized a retrospective of his work. Barrio will participate in the upcoming Documenta XI, 2002.

“The plaza and the street will come to occupy a preponderant place in Barrio's work, converted to theatrical stages as protagonists in the development of his work which will come to be systematically called ‘situations' with an emphasis on the instant in which it occurs and its fragile presence. …These places mark and sum up the ambiguously monumental character of Barrio's work. Because these spaces are simply mute remainders, a part of daily experience which the instruments of capital cannot entirely obliterate, their singularity is not perceived as such. Barrio's work constitutes, in total, the most faithful contemporary monument to those naked and empty forms of subjectivity, not completely silent but far from any eloquence, that stoically support the doubtful gift of their own fragility” —Carlos Basualdo

“…[Barrio] constitutes a particular inflection of [the experimentalist frame of mind of the sixties]”—Ricardo Basbaum